Back up your Help Center articles at the click of a button!

Welcome

Let me introduce you to kBackup! This little app will allow you to back up your help centre content at the click of a button to your local hard drive.

Using this app makes backing up your help centre content a breeze.

Features

The app currently has a number of features and may be expanded to include additional features if the demand is there.

The app will back up your help centres or web portals content to a specified folder as HTML pages in the format of [ArticleId].html. The app will first verify that the user exists in the given Zendesk domain. This is included for security reasons so only users who exist in the domain can back up the content.

The app will work for any Zendesk help centre or web portal even if you chose to use the Host Mapping feature as the original Zendesk subdomain will still exist, regardless of what you have currently set as your hostname.

Using the app to back up your help centre or web portal content is completely safe and will not affect any existing data, it will simply take a copy of it so there is no possibility for data loss during the process.

Requirements

There are some requirements for using this app that need to be met in order for it to function correctly. I've included these requirements below:

This program is compatible with Windows only.

Please note that SSO sign-in and 2FA is not currently supported. A Zendesk account that was created and is managed within Zendesk is required.

Your user must have ‘Password Access’ to the API enabled in Zendesk. You can do this by going to Settings > Channels (Subsection) > API and enabling ‘Password Access’.

The app requires Microsoft.Net Framework 4.6 or higher to be installed on the Windows PC or Laptop where it’s being run, this version of the .NET Framework can be downloaded here.

I recommend running the app as Administrator to avoid any permission issues backing up to your selected backup location. This can be done by right-clicking the kBackup.exe and selecting ‘Run as administrator’.

Getting Started

To get started with backing up your help centre content ensure that you have met the requirements above, then go ahead and follow the steps below:

Release Notes

Release notes have been moved into ReleaseNotes.txt which is now included in the download package.

Giving Feedback & Reporting Bugs

For any feedback, feature & functionality requests or bugs you may have come across please leave a reply here or email me at felix.stubner(@)gmail.com and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

If kBackup has helped you and you want to show your appreciation feel free to click on the little up arrow on this post to up vote it. Thanks for your support!

Disclaimer

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

168 Comments

Thanks for the information. Exciting to hear of of your current work on importing in bulk.

Unfortunately our Zendesk is a closed Zendesk so we would need to schedule another way to actually test.

What I can tell you is that for the vast majority of our Help Center resources I have been leveraging the drag and drop convenience of Skitch (screen capture from Evernote). So I haven't uploaded saved jpeg images. Although Skitch captures do create a jpg file. The images do appear as a jpg in the source code.

Yet the export file included only 1 screen print in the images folder.

Not sure if this helps but the image above was drag/dropped into this comment entry via Skitch.

@Corrin - I've had a look at the images you included but unfortunately I would need to debug my application to see the exact URL structure and what the request returns but I would require a login to a user account that has access to the content. If that is something you could organize I can definitely look into that and try to find a solution. Looking forward to hearing from you. Please also feel free to email me at felix.stubner@gmail.com

@Eugene - Thanks again for giving kBackup a try. As mentioned in my email I will be investigating the issue that you had come across regarding the images. After debugging using the user credentials you provided I believe I have identified the issue. I will be sending you a test version during the day tomorrow to confirm the fix. Speak to you soon!

The dstats.net page isn’t working

@Chandra - Hey sorry to hear you are having some trouble with the download. I have just tested the links myself and there do not seem to be any issues. However if you are still having some troubles you can find a direct download link here. Let me know how you get on with that :)

@Michael - Thanks for giving the app a try, sorry to hear that you are having some troubles with it.

This particular error occurs when it's trying to download an image but can't understand the URL structure. Fixing this will require some code updates but I'd need to look at the structure of the URL. Could you email me at felix.stubner@gmail.com with the sub-domain of your Help Center and I can investigate the issue. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Hi Felix -- Just wanted to pass on an issue I'm experiencing: After kbackup creates a backup of my Help Center content & images, the BackupLog.txt file that's created cannot be opened. When I try to open the file, I get this error message:

I'm not sure why I'm getting this error -- the backup log is right there in the backup folder & it has data in it (it's 14KB). Any idea why/how this might be happening?

Thanks for your help & all your hard work!

UPDATE: I think I figured this one out on my own -- it's a fault on my own computer, nothing to do with kbackup. Sorry for my confusion!!

Thank you!

Hey everyone, kBackup just hit 200 downloads! I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has tried it and glad to see that so many have found a use for it.

As a little thank you I want to give you a preview of what you can expect to see in the next release. I also sprinkled in some screenshots!

Migration to and from Help Center/Community. It will only support full migrations at first. However, later I plan to include selective migrations where the user can choose the specific content to migrate.

Restoring backups, bout time this made it in hehe

Automatic backups, and easy to set up too, no gimmicks, just options!

Fun fact, I have changed the way the app works a little. Instead of running the app and clicking a button to backup your content, the app will now instead sync all of your data to your PC when you log in (Or if you choose to refresh from within the app). This means that you will always have the data there, and I am thinking of different formats to export it to. If you have any particular formats that you think might be useful to have your exports in, please do leave a reply ^.^

Ability to browse all content in your Help Center or Community through kBackup in an intuitive hierarchy structure.

Some nifty profile info from your Zendesk profile. (Don't worry, I don't collect any data, it will only remain on your PC and only if you select "Remember me" option).

Speaking of which, a "Remember me" option so you don't have to enter all those details again.

Encryption of user details when stored locally on the PC.

Here are some more ideas that I have already noted to put on the roadmap:

Automatic updates, so you can rest easy and let kBackup take care of the rest.

Ability to manage content through the app, because really, that just seems like it would be a really great feature to be able to offer everyone.

Ability to multi-select content in the app so you can delete or make edits to multiple items at a time.

Ability to encrypt your backed up files.

Meet Cloudy! :D

Cloudy is someone you may run into if the data could not be synced. But don't worry, he will kindly provide a Refresh link so you can try to sync your data again.

As always you guys here are an absolute pleasure to work with and do let me know if you have any feedback or other functionality you want to see in kBackup.

For some reason it seems to backup only english artcles at the moment.

I have also Finnish translations of almost every article, but any of those are not being exported.

This isn´t really any problem, most important thing is to have base materials backed up and it´s easy to translate again if needed.

I just noticed another thing that should be noticed. I was able to also download all the articles restricted to Agents and Managers when I used End-user account. This can be issue if some customer would find this tool and have access to all data.

@Joni - Thanks for getting in touch and trying out kBackup. Multiple localizations of the same content is something that slipped my mind when I was writing the post above. However it is something I have though about and would require a bit of work. I'll note it down for a future release.

Regarding your ability to download content that should be locked. I have done some testing on this when I first created the app. The way that it works for Zendesk is that if you do not provide valid credentials to a user account when logging in through kBackup, you will still be able to retrieve all content that is visible publicly by anyone. You should not be seeing content that the user should not have access too. If this was the case then it would be an issue with the Zendesk API that

If you have any additional questions or if there's anything else I can do for you please don't hesitate to get back to me.

Migration & restoring backups would be amazing! My company is going through a rebranding effort & these features would make rebranding our Help Center content infinitely easier. Any estimate on when the next release might occur?

Thank you Felix! Exciting news on the refinements on the horizon. Question for you on the automatic backups. Anyway to we can utilize some command line parameters to have the auto-backup on a network share instead of just locally on the PC?

@Corrin - You will be able to select any drive that your PC has access to, however I still need to do some testing whether or not there are any implications when backing up to network drives specifically.

@Kim - Sorry to hear you are running into some trouble there, could you email me your Zendesk domain name to felix.stubner@gmail.com and I can look into this for you.

Heya! I love this tool, but am having an issue. Only about half of our articles get backed up (I'm using v0.6). The ones not getting backed up seem to be random, though I wonder if it's related to this message:

@Duke - Hey, thanks so much for giving kBackup a try. Sorry to hear that you are having an issue here. It appears that the way that images are backed up varies very widely from user to user. This is like a way images are stored which I did not account for.

I will need to investigate what exactly gets returned and what the URL string is, could you email me at felix.stubner@gmail.com with your Zendesk sub-domain.

@Neal - Thanks for checking out the tool. I am it 100% sure if this information is available through the api. If it is then I don't think it would be difficult to do. I will add it to my list but there are some other features I'd like I get completed first. Thanks again for getting in touch! :)